This week I have been going over my presentation and trying to finish my project. There is still plenty of analyzing left and along with a few more samples left to be hybridized. I am also starting on my paper. And thats about it.

This week is was busy stripping microarray chips. We finally hybridize a full duplicate set of 8 samples and are now looking at the results. Unfortunately, much cannot be concluded until we hybridize more samples, but this is a start. Right now im working on my presentation and changing more smaples from RNA to cDNA.

This week I have finished extracting the samples that we have found. I also turned 6 samples into cDNA while updating the sample sheet data. Now we are deciding which samples should be hybridized. Once that is decided, those samples will be labeled with probes and put on a chip for microarray analysis. From there, we get to analyze the data.

This week in the lab we focused on turning the isolated RNA into cDNA. From here we add the labelled probes to the cDNA before we are finally ready to place them on the microarray chips. Turning the RNA into cDNA is kind of an important step. If the isolation was bad, we would not see a good yield in cDNA. This is particularly important because the conversion from RNA to cDNA itself reduces the amount of product. Thankfully, my cDNA yield was pretty good which also means my isolation technique is pretty good also.

This week I have been extracting RNA from the samples that we thought were good candidates for our project. My technique for RNA isolation is pretty good and is becoming more routine the more I practice it in the lab. Once we have enough samples isolated, we will start to hybridize them. Next week, we will probably hybridize them so that we can finally use the microarray.

This week we have been trying to figure out which samples to use. We need about 24 samples. This week we have went thru the cruise log of water samples and identified a sample selection of a possible 30 samples. This list is not complete however, and we still need to finalize the selection. We also started to find some of the samples on the list, but have found that it is going to require a fair amount of digging into various -80oC freezers to find them, kinda like fishing for filters. I also attempted at extracting RNA, but failed.

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